That's how they getcha: "The Meeting" by Alex Olhin

"The Meeting" by Alex Olhin is about three ways capitalism can kill you. The first is slow and figurative, the second slow and literal, and the final immediate, literal, and terrifying.

Death number one in the story is announced at the eponymous meeting that gives the story its name. The small company run by James Halladay--what does it do? Health care or something?--is being bought out by a media conglomerate. Almost everyone is losing their job, meaning they've been putting up with the buzzwords and the boredom for nothing. Bryan just put money down on a condo and now he's stuck with it. Mallory has some kind of illness that's very serious, and she could barely afford it with health insurance, let alone without it. But there are margaritas to wash the pain down with, and since they're all alienated labor anyway, they'll probably find something else and not care much in the long run. The first way capitalism kills you, then, is small and petty and kind of a death by a thousand paper cuts. It mostly just kills your soul. This part of the story is familiar and probably part of every office-based story in the last 25 years. 

The next two ways it kills you are a little less well trodden. Both Mallory and James have serious illnesses. James got his when his mother, a social activist in Peru, carried him through a forest fire as a baby. His lungs have never been right, he coughs all the time, and he'll eventually need a new lung. Mallory as a child played in a river downstream from a paper factory, and she wonders if that's the reason she's got the problems she has now. Capitalism kills our souls slowly, but it also kills our bodies slowly by damaging the environment. Ironic, then, that they both work for a company whose brand has something to do with wellness. 

Finally, capitalism can kill us quickly and brutally. James and Mallory go to California to meet the CEO of the company that bought them out. During their trip, they run into a forest fire that kills them. This is the second forest fire in James' life, and this one finally did him in. Instead of one soulless job killing an office of a few people inside, now the combination of all soulless jobs had cooked the planet until it is killing all of us. 

"The Meeting" is a darker entry in American office-based fiction of the last generation.

Two kinds of CEO

The story contrasts two CEOs. There's James Halliday and there's Arthur McClellan. James is--there's no way to see it any other way--a good person. He was raised by charitable parents and he continues to be charitable as an adult. He is courteous. He gives away umbrellas to old ladies in the rain when nobody is watching. He keeps Mallory on during the transition because he senses she is sick and needs the job. He's earnest and he cares. Most of all, he thinks he's part of the solution, not the problem: "He believed it wasn't too late to change the world."

There are a lot of people like James among the CEOs of the world. I recently did a year and a half at one of the biggest corporations in the world, and I can tell you that the top executives in that company really believe what they're saying when they say the company is going to make the world a better place. A lot of CEOs are still philanthropic in a not completely cynical, for-photo-op-only way. That's James.

But James, in spite of having good looks and charisma that make people naturally want to follow him, ultimately loses control of his company to Arthur. Arthur is just evil. He's the stereotypical weird corporate magnate, full of idiosyncrasies and weird habits and phobias. He's probably brilliant, which is why his company is succeeding so much, but he's evil enough that when Mallory arrives at his headquarters, it reminds her of nothing so much as a supervillain's secret lair. 

Maybe the asshole is destined to triumph over the enlightened capitalist/philanthropist. Maybe Jeff Bezos conquers Bill Gates. Or evil Elon Musk takes over good Elon Musk. Mallory wonders at the end if James' charm, rather than being "integral to his success," is instead "a detriment; or, what seemed somehow sadder, an irrelevance." 

Lack of options

So what's a struggling worker to do to escape the bad options? Not much, it seems. The only real plan out of the hapless schlobs in the story are to become a lawyer and make a lot of money so you can buy land to live on when the apocalypse comes. That, and drink watermelon margaritas at Nacho Mamacitas to dull the pain. One plan is probably an "Of Mice and Men" kind of plan that will never work out, and the other is just another way to die slowly.

In last year's Best American Short Stories, we also had a wildfire story, "Paradise" by Yxta Maya Murray. That one also ended with people finding each other in the chaos, although in Paradise, they only lose their belongings, not their lives. "The Meeting" has several meetings in it: the opening meeting, the meeting with the new company, and then Mallory and James holding a final meeting of two as the flames engulf them. Perhaps one can say that the soul of "Paradise" was, like James, to think the world could still be saved, but "The Meeting" holds no such hope.